Twisten.FM is Potentially the Hottest App on the Web Today for Indie Artists

One of the biggest challenges facing independent artists today is getting their work in front of as large an audience as possible and, without the money provided by a major record label, this has always been almost impossible. It seems as though the major labels create the music available for radio playlists and small or independent labels are pretty much shut out of that venue.

It is true that, with the evolution of the Internet, indie bands have had access to many new forms of exposure on Myspace and sites such as iTunes. However, none of those tools has given quite the same exposure that good old fashioned radio can. Radio can reach millions of random listeners at any given moment and thereby expose your songs to new audiences who have never heard of your band. With traditional Web sites like Myspace or iTunes you are pretty much limited in the exposure that you get as an artist to your own circle of friends and have to depend on those fans to give you exposure via word of mouth to their friends.

Twitter has created a whole new perspective on social media though. Via Twitter messages you can stay in touch with your friends just like on other networking sites but, unlike other sites, all of your "tweets" (messages) also post on the main twitter site feed. There is the beauty of it. Twitter has something like 6 million registered users with 55 million monthly page views and so posting to the public timeline on Twitter is essentially very much like reaching millions of random members of a radio audience.

Twisten.FM is a creation of the folks at Grooveshark. Grooveshark is a (legal) music sharing site that allows users to upload their music and stream it to friends. Users can also search the uploads on Grooveshark and thereby have access to all of the songs uploaded to the site. Twisten.FM is a user interface between Grooveshark and Twitter that lets you post links to the songs that you are listening to on Grooveshark directly to your Twitter account. Just enter the name of the song and Twisten.FM searches the Grooveshark database for you, finds the song and provides a post ready tweet for you. I think it is a frigging awesome idea.

A market savvy indie band might, for example, get themselves an account at Grooveshark, upload their songs there and then post them as links in tweet messages on Twitter via Twisten.FM on a regular basis and thereby have their music and their name put in front of 55 million people every month. That would certainly open up a whole new level of exposure for the band and potentially lead to all sorts of good things like booking gigs and even putting themselves in front of record execs who Twitter.

Of course Grooveshark does have their own promotion function (login required) for bands, but if you don't have the budget for it then doing it the way I described would also work and is grassroots marketing at its best. I give Twisten.FM two thumbs up for creating a very cool music application and social network marketing tool.